Essays in the Romantic PoetsMacmillan, 1924 - 276 pages |
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abstract active Ancient asserts beauty become beginning believe Book Byron Cain cause century character child Christianity close Coleridge Coleridge's conceived conception considered created critics death deep Deity divine doctrine early earth effect energy essay essential eternal evil existence experience expressed fact faith feeling force freedom Friend gives growth heart heaven hope human ideas imagination immortality individual influence instance kind knowledge later light lines live man's Mariner matter meaning method mind moral Nature Necessitarian Necessity never objects Ode to Duty original passage passive past philosophy poem poet poet's poetry possessed Prelude present principle pure reason religion religious revealed says seems sense Shelley Shelley's soul speak spirit Stanza things thinking thou thought tion true truth unity universe whole Wordsworth writings written youth
Popular passages
Page 187 - Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide ; The Form remains, the Function never dies ; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish ; — be it -so ! Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour ; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know.
Page 47 - Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud — Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud — We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light.
Page 71 - The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.
Page 235 - Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
Page 44 - ... Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye Amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away ! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll : And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve, And HOPE without an object cannot live.
Page 30 - I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.
Page 25 - And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Page 260 - There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page...
Page 251 - Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye, With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul To make these felt and feeling, well may be Things that have made me watchful; the far roll Of your departing voices, is the knoll Of what in me is sleepless, — if I rest. But where of ye, O tempests! is the goal? Are ye like those within the human breast? Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?
Page 146 - I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.